Martin Vander Weyer

There has just been a rather meaningless debate about whether Jeff Bezos of Amazon or Bill Gates of Microsoft should be labelled ‘the richest man in the world’. Both are notionally worth more than $90 billion, although Bezos was briefly ahead by a nose after a surge in the value of his Amazon shares. It was meaningless because such unimaginable wealth ‘can’t change how many people love you or how healthy you are’ — as the world’s fourth richest man, Warren Buffett, once remarked — and can’t even buy you more fun than, say, the $5 billion fortune of our own Sir Richard Branson.

What with yet another warning from the Bank of England this week about rising consumer debt, and my own prediction that we’re heading for an economic trough within 18 months, this doesn’t feel like a good time to be paying top dollar for luxury brands. When Jimmy Choo, the maker of super-expensive strappy stilettos, was put up for sale by its German majority shareholder in April at a valuation of £700 million, I revealed that I definitely wouldn’t be a bidder. But it’s being so cautious that makes me a humble columnist rather than a wheeler-dealer billionaire: US fashion brand Michael Kors is buying the shoe company for £896 million ‘after an auction that attracted a host of international bidders’.

Now here’s a tricky question. The world’s largest oil company, potentially worth six times as much as ExxonMobil and ten times as much as Royal Dutch Shell, wants to list its shares on a major stock exchange next year, and has indicated that the choice is between London and New York. The company’s initial public offering of just 5 per cent of its shares promises a $100 billion deal that will generate a fee bonanza for bankers, lawyers and PR men in the chosen marketplace, with several more tranches to come. Clearly London should go all-out to win this lucrative and prestigious piece of business, which would reconfirm the City’s pre-eminent place in the financial world.

Would a cashless world be a better place, morally or fiscally? Matthew Taylor, in his relatively uncontroversial review of work practices and the ‘gig economy’ published on Tuesday, proposed that the £6 billion ‘cash in hand’ economy of payment for window cleaning, gardening, leaflet distributing and similar simple tasks should be regularised and brought into the tax net through the use of apps and other digital payment platforms. Would that really be a good thing? The first point to be made is that it’s probably going to happen anyway over the next decade — at least if we go the way of Sweden. There, cards and phones are almost universally used, even for the smallest transactions.

Regular readers know I have an umbilical connection to Barclays, because my father spent his working life there, I was on the payroll myself for a decade, and I wrote a book about the bank’s modern history, called Falling Eagle. So I cannot react objectively to news that the Serious Fraud Office has brought charges against Barclays’ holding company and four former executives in relation to the £7 billion fundraising from Middle Eastern investors, including Qatar Holdings, that saved it from a taxpayer bailout in 2008. On behalf of the extended family of Barclays folk, I cannot feel anything but sadness to see a once-respected institution brought into the dock.

Take no notice of the resilience of the FTSE100 index, which, having reached record pre-election highs, shed barely 100 points at its opening last Friday and recovered most of them by Monday. Dominated by multinational companies, it is being sustained by global market sentiment and the relative weakness of the pound, which makes our blue chips look good value; it is not offering a signal that investors think all is well. But do take notice of the Institute of Directors, speaking largely for mid-sized businesses, when it says that confidence among its members has crashed since polling day: from 34 per cent optimistic vs 37 per cent gloomy last month, to 20 per cent upbeat against 57 per cent ‘quite or very pessimistic’ now.

‘Fred Goodwin off the hook again,’ declared the Scottish Daily Record. That neatly summed up one strand of sentiment behind the RBS Shareholder Action Group’s battle for compensation for losses incurred in the bank’s £12 billion rights issue in 2008 — preceding its £45 billion taxpayer bailout, in which any remaining shareholder value was largely wiped out. Investors who believe they were misled by RBS’s directors and the rights-issue prospectus have been campaigning for their money back ever since.

Who should be housing supremo in what we all assume will be Mrs May’s new administration? Brandon Lewis and Gavin Barwell, recent junior ministers with that brief, achieved nothing — if we also assume the brief was to procure an adequate supply of new homes, in the private sector or ‘social’ one, which the ‘just about managing’ could afford. The number of affordable homes built in 2015-16 was just 32,000, half that built in the previous year and the lowest since 1992. But action is coming — apparently. ‘We will fix the broken housing market,’ declares Mrs May, mustard-keen on fixing broken markets, ‘to build a new generation of council homes right across the country.

‘Do you still hate bankers?’ asked an old friend whom I hadn’t seen for years, having himself made a good career in overseas banking. Not at all, I said, and I never did. It’s been my mission to shame bad ones, but there are many I have liked and admired. Among those was Julian Wathen, a Barclays overseas veteran who has died aged 93, and whose story illuminates one key fact: at least today’s bankers don’t get shot at. As manager of the Limassol branch in Cyprus in 1956, Wathen survived being shot through the neck by an Eoka gunman who, the Times reported, ‘walked into his office, fired, and then decamped without interference from anyone’. Wathen’s successor Joseph Brander was shot dead on the steps of the same branch two years later.